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Our take: Red Lion suffers in silence

Days after the shooting of Principal Eugene Segro, letters, flowers and candles created a memorial outside Red Lion Area Junior High School. (DAILY RECORD / SUNDAY NEWS -- FILE)

If past experience is predictive, here are some phrases that will be spoken or written in letters to the editor in the coming days:

"Dredging up the past."

"Stirring things up."

"It's time to move on."

Those are the kinds of things many York countians said in 2001 when prosecutors began re-examining the 1968 race riot murders in York and local newspapers provided extensive coverage.

Nothing good can come of this, many local people said.

Well, several people received sentences for those long-unsolved murders. That was a positive result of "dredging up the past."

There were other benefits as well: A thorough re-examination of how those terrible days came to pass; measuring how far our community had grown in terms of race relations - and where there was still room for growth.

In the case of the April 24, 2003, Red Lion Area Junior High School shooting, the subject of a detailed and moving retrospective by reporter Bill Landauer and visual journalist Jason Plotkin in today's newspaper (and at ydr.com), there will not likely be any serving of long-delayed justice.

Beloved Principal Eugene Segro is gone.

So is his killer, Jimmy Sheets, 14, who immediately killed himself.

But the shots that rang out in the cafeteria that day still reverberate through the Red Lion community.

As today's piece shows, they ring louder in the ears and memories of some than in others.

Jimmy Sheets' shots victimized more people than Dr. Segro.

They set off years of suffering, of post traumatic stress disorders for some who witnessed the shootings - and even for some who were not in the cafeteria that day.

Over the years, there have been memorials erected and remembrances in Red Lion. An annual run honors Dr. Segro. Student handprints adorn the junior high cafeteria walls.

Those things have surely promoted healing. School officials have done much to help in that effort - and generously cooperated in the reporting on this retrospective.

And yet some still suffer, unable to move past that traumatic day.

What more can be done to promote healing? Could a public gathering or vigil to openly discuss the pain caused by this awful incident help?

Could we bring folks together to share their stories and what they have done to transcend the horror that stained their lives that day - to let those who suffer know they are not alone?

Yes, that would be one positive, concrete step toward wholeness.

Another would be openness.

At the center of this community wound is the agonizing question: Why?

Even Jimmy Sheets' friends remain baffled.

Police, those who investigated the case and have read the full file, have theories. Former Red Lion Police Chief Walter Hughes thinks Sheets didn't set out to shoot anyone, just to show off with weapons - and the killing and suicide were essentially a horrific accident.

He might be right. But it's impossible to draw any objective conclusions on that theory because the investigative file remains secret. Police have long refused to release the full file.

York Area Regional Police, which inherited the file when the Red Lion Police force was disbanded, provided a short document but will not release the full report - or even a redacted report.

That apparently is the department's prerogative under state law, which exempts police investigatory records.

But YARP officials should reconsider and allow public access to the file on an event that shattered a community. Let people and experts read the reports and draw their own conclusions.

There may well be something that can be learned from those documents. Releasing them might result in some silver lining for the community, as there clearly was in the riot murder cases that helped exorcise old racial demons in York.

Yes, those shots are still reverberating in Red Lion.

Not talking about the lingering trauma, burying the past in a dusty police file, has not and probably will not silence them. A renewed public discourse could help those who still suffer.